Why don’t you do your own research instead of just swallowing the crap from your friend. Though, frankly, I think you know the content posted at the blog is nonsense. The ‘butter’ stuff was at the benzowithdrawal.com forum (not BenzoBuddies), and as it was explained to me, like the vast majority of the stolen content appearing at the abusive blog, it was totally misrepresented. My experience is that 99% of the content there lies somewhere between deliberate misrepresentation, and damn lies.

How food marketers made butter the enemy

James McWilliams—a historian who has made a name for himself in prestigious publications like the New York Times and The Atlantic for his contrarian defenses of the food industry—is back at it. In an item published last week in the excellent Pacific Standard, McWilliams uses the controversy over a recent study of saturated fat as a club with which to pummel food industry critics like the Times’ Mark Bittman.

Here’s what happened: A group including Harvard and Cambridge researchers analyzed 72 studies and concluded that there’s no clear evidence that ditching saturated fat (the kind found mainly in butter, eggs, and meat) for the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated kind (found in fish and a variety of vegetable oils) delivers health benefits.

Bittman responded to the study’s release with a Times item declaring that “butter is back.” His real point was more nuanced than that, though. The study’s conclusion “doesn’t mean you [should] abandon fruit for beef and cheese,” he wrote. Rather, he urged, “you [should] just abandon fake food for real food, and in that category of real food you can include good meat and dairy.”

Not so fast, McWilliams countered. He pointed out, correctly, that the study turned out to have errors, which the authors had to correct. But even after the corrections, the study’s lead author stood by the overall findings, Science reported. Another one of the authors told Science that the study’s main problem was the way it was covered by media. “We are not saying the guidelines are wrong and people can eat as much saturated fat as they want,” he told Science. “We are saying that there is no strong support for the guidelines and we need more good trials.”

Of course, headline aside, Bittman didn’t fall into that trap. He merely urged his readers to accept some fat when they’re “looking for a few chunks of pork for a stew,” and to use real butter in place of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” Indeed, Bittman’s call for moderation in eating animal products is long-standing—he’s the author of a book called Vegan Before Six and a longtime champion of the “Meatless Mondays” practice.

But McWilliams’ real beef (so to speak) ultimately didn’t involve the study itself, or the debate over fat’s place in our diets. Rather, it centered on Bittman’s critique of the food industry, which Bittman blamed for stoking the public’s fat phobia, and manipulating to its own ends. McWilliams chides Bittman for the “disingenuousness of using a study on fat and heart health as grounds for condemning processed food,” and laments the “dubious manner in which processed foods are condemned.”

But he misses an important point: You can’t meaningfully debate the role of fat in our diets without looking hard at the way the food industry has manipulated the evolving scientific consensus around fat. On NPR last week, reporter Allison Aubrey showed how widespread fat phobia among the public gained traction from a 1977 decree by a US Senate committee that people should consume less saturated fat—which then got interpreted by the food industry as a license to promote sugar-laden, carbohydrate-rich products as “low fat” and thus healthy.

Simultaneously, as Bittman correctly noted, trans fats—cheap vegetable oils treated with hydrogen so that they remain solid at room temperature—emerged as the food industry’s butter substitute of choice for decades, providing the main substance for margarine. Based on relentless food industry marketing, generations of people grew up thinking trans-fat-laden margarine was healthier than butter—even after science definitively showed that it was much, much worse (a sorry tale I laid out here).

These fat-related marketing triumphs, quite profitable for the food industry, coincided with a surge in diet-related health troubles, including heightened obesity, diabetes, and metabolic-syndrome rates. Bittman is correct to discuss highly processed food in the context of the controversy over fat; and in trying to force it out of the conversation, McWilliams is playing his usual role: reasonable-sounding defender of a highly profitable but dysfunctional industry.

A lot of people that are prescribed benzos ARE mentally ill and a lot of said mentally ill people ARE on Benzo Buddies.

When I found Benzo Buddies last year I was traumatized for a second time in my life.

ANYONE who is in the vulnerable state of even mild acute benzo withdrawal (assuming they are part of the minority of people that actually have a really hard time with it) would be extra susceptible and sensitive to the power of suggestion to the degree in which being unfortunate enough to stumble across BenzoBuddies during such a time could mean SEVERE psychological damage.

I know because it happened to me. Had I not found that site and had the EVER LIVING NIPPLES scared off of me I do believe I would be OK right now. First I came off of opiates (prescribed) that I had been a “true addict” to… as in, physically dependent and using the painkillers daily to run from a hellish psychological nightmare… a bundle of awful automatic negative thinking and cognitive distortions that I created in my own mind after experiencing severe trauma for the first time in my life as well as panic attacks beginning at the 18th birthday party my friends in highschool were throwing me. There’s a point to my delving into this.

We all used recreational drugs in highschool… products of our environment I guess you could say (but not trying to avoid responsibility for my own actions.) and on that night I swallowed one to many of some sort of designer pills a friend had and everything went all messed up, impossible to verbalize because there is no reference point in our perceptions to place the change in psyche in contrast beside what it may have been earlier. Hard to detect a change but definitely something terrifying. This initial fear turned my ultra confident, truly happy self into a nervous wreck and I NEVER learned how to deal with it. After 5-6 months I realized that opiates were the only thing that made me not care about the looping anxious thoughts I was having which I now believe was a fear of feeling worry and fear themselves associating themselves with philosophical/existential questions that I believed to be the cause of my distress but it was all just a big cognitive distortion which was TRIGGERED by an initial OVERLOAD of fear and panic… like say the kind of fear and panic one might feel when they are tapering off a medication that their trusty doctor prescribed them… decide to look it up… and find fucking BenzoBuddies and the Ashton manual… supposedly a benzo professional that knows more than your doctor with thousands of people to back it all up… all using their own lingo… no longer associating with the rest of society but amongst themselves exclusively. How is the potentially (extra) neurotic & anxious person supposed to know that these thousands of people and this professional… the way it is being presented to them… it is simply the terrifying results of what a mass of people can do using fear and negative reinforcement to break people and reconstruct their minds in a manner in which will benefit THEM or their cause. (Hail fucking Xenu).

So basically… my underlying cause for medicating myself for 7 years of my life was the automatic negative thinking that occurred after a traumatic period in my life. What I was running from by using opiates was no more than an illusion created in my own pessimistic mind which was only pessimistic because of the initial negative event to begin with.

I think this is a great analogy for the poor souls at benzobuddies that weren’t lucky enough to realize that these sites are the results of a mass of people after being frightened and then manipulated by some VERY sick people. Look at this poster above.

“Don’t tell me it’s all in my head.”

I am not saying at all that the awful distress that benzobuddies members must endure… the suicidal, hopeless despair they feel as a result of having their worst fears confirmed… truly believing they will be crippled… unable to live their lives for YEARS and based on the word of THOUSANDS as well as a “professional when it comes to benzos” and a freaking book. Sorry, ADHD… I’m not saying that this awful distress is not real. But it’s BECAUSE of the attitude that corresponds with “Don’t tell me it’s all in my head.”

This is disgusting. It suggests that the human mind is powerless within the limitations of its own neurotransmitter systems. I’ve wondered a great deal about this chicken/egg ordeal here but I think it’s either both or neither. Either way… people have the ability to choose to fight against struggles in their lives regardless of their GABA, glutamate, dopamine, endorphin configurations. It’s this disgusting mentality corresponding with that quote that makes these… absolute victims feel like “No matter what I do I’m going to be sick.” “If I am depressed and do nothing but sit on benzobuddies all day it is not my fault. My doctor did this to me. All I can do is wait instead of… challenging the horrific hopeless negative thoughts that ALL manifested as a negative and exponentially, malignantly growing way of thinking that you could think of like a computer virus copying itself to the person’s entire psychological state of being.

Ugh. Sorry for the book. I know Mike59 and some others probably understand and agree with what I’m saying but it really bothers me that not a lot of others seem to be able to grasp what’s going on.

“It’s not my fault if I’m depressed and have become an invalid because benzobuddies says the doctors have carelessly poisoned me.”

“That’s a load of crap”

“No! You just don’t know professor ashton wrote about it in this… book and all of the benzobuddies and waves and windows and benzo belly and benzo brain… you know what I’m just going to go back to talking to benzobuddies… the only people who know what’s up”

How does anyone not see what is going on here?

Should anyone… TELL these people that anxiety and stress have 250+ physical and psychological symptoms alone? How about the anxiety of having someone tell you while in an anxious state that your life is essentially over… for 2-3 years if you’re lucky. The anxiety from that and the hopeless despair DEFINITELY are the cause of more symptoms than the benzowithdrawal itself. Statistically speaking, only about 18 people out of the entirety on that site should be experiencing ANY withdrawal.

LOOK HOW MUCH SUFFERING IS GOING ON FOR NOTHING and mike59 makes a site like this and it comes off as if his motives result from a personal vendetta so whether or not he is sincere in his mission to stop suffering in this enormous amount of people… it doesn’t matter because for the same reasons that people get sucked into the benzobuddies crap.. they get sucked into believing the critiquing of benzobuddies = hate which is just bullshit.

I have no ill intentions towards anyone on those sites unless they really are aware of the suffering they’re causing and not stopping it for the sake of supporting something like scientology… for the sake of being a part of something… whatever reason. Aside from that I wish every member on that site luck and athough I do agree that the site contains good information… why couldn’t the owners type up something like this post and put it in the user agreement to spare people the hellish nightmare of needlessly thinking their lives are over when their chances of experiencing withdrawal at ALL let alone needing to taper for years are less than 50%?

WHAT IS IT THAT IS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND HERE? Just another example of humanity ostracizing the one person that isn’t part of the problem… of ludicrous misinformation in this case. Oh the rest of the world can’t comprehend what this post I wrote up in 15 mins means even if it could save lives. Benzobuddies that sounds like a nice name! Look it says its a forum for SUPPORT! Someone is ridiculing the support site? Let’s go ahead and asume they’re wrong and post hate pages that show up on google of the real names of people behind it and potentially jeopardize their real lives and the lives of their families for speaking up against our RIDICULOUSLY unimpressive (when considering the potential it has to help rather than hurt) support forum.

Yeah mike59 you’re a dick. How dare you provide an outlet for this type of life-saving information.

Ps. I tapered my 3mg of clonazepam 0.5 mg at a time over 2.5 months and then went 1/8 mg per week for 4 weeks to get off of the last half mg. I was on it for over half a decade every day. When I found benzobuddies last year I was traumatized for a second time in my life. I’m glad I was blessed enough to be a naturally critical thinker which allowed me to question what I was being taught there as I do most things to the extent in which one day my anxiety and despair suddenly alleviated to a ridiculous degree… almost to the point of euphoria… because I was thinking about some of the realities surrounding what a “hypochondria heaven” of that many people could truly cause in vulnerable people and realized some of the things I’ve mentioned in this post… and thus the nightmare world had an escape. I wasn’t doomed. I then punched in what I thought of benzobuddies to see if ANYONE noticed the flaw in these benzo forums (I’m not even getting into the fact that a lot of people that are prescribed benzos ARE mentally ill… and a lot of said mentally ill people ARE on benzobuddies. You will never see them contemplating whether or not someone should stay on their meds. How does this stuff not JUMP OUT AT EVERYONE?!” and when I did that I found this site ran by one “Mike Fifty-Nine”. After googling that handle I immediately found a hate site directed towards him threatening real life harm on the man behind the username? Because he’s doing this!

I’m ending this for the sake of the attention-spans of potential readers/lurkers with the assumption that my point has been made clear to anyone that is capable of thinking on a level that is not “absolutely moronic”. I don’t mean to be hostile but are there really only ~6 people in the world that are;

1. Aware of benzobuddies or similar sites.

&

2. Capable of understanding this?! Seriously?

TL:DR – Take some d-amphetamines and try again. I’m not catering to people who can’t be bothered to read what I took the time to write with good intentions towards the very people that would be most likely to criticize the validity of what I’m saying and my motives for typing it. What a sad and frustrating state of affairs. Someone read this… and do something about the absolutely ludicrous existence of “benzo support forums” under the premise that it is QUITE OBVIOUS how they do more harm than good?

There. I tried. Let’s see if it was worth it. (I doubt it.) If anyone doubts the validity of what I’m saying still after reading this post I can keep going. I could specify on literally every quote on that poster up above and logically spell out why it’s representative of benzobuddies causing more harm than good (by far) and I still wouldn’t be 10% through making every point that I could brainstorm to back up my opinion (facts) surrounding BB and similar sites.

Thoughts of Bliss

"It was even suggested that Valium should be added, like fluoride, to the drinking water. Together people would be blessed both with tranquility and strong teeth." - Prof. Heather Ashton, December 2011

"I must confess, I have thought about becoming either a phone sex operator or a cam sex operator, probs phone first. I wish I knew some girls who would show me the ropes. I can’t seem to get any info online." - Benzo Buddies member Journey, September 2012

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